Full Name: Dr Elena Sottilotta

College: Murray Edwards College

Position: Research Fellow

Email: ees45@cam.ac.uk              

Location:

Murray Edwards College
Huntingdon Road
Cambridge
CB3 0DF
United Kingdom

About

Dr Elena Sottilotta is Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. A Fulbright alumna, she obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge with a research project in women’s studies, folklore and fairy-tale studies. In 2024, she was a Visiting Scholar at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and a Fellow of the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities in New York.

Her areas of expertise encompass women’s and gender studies, the history of folklore, fairy-tale studies, children’s literature, comparative literature and intermedia studies. She is the author of Seekers of Wonder: Women Writing Folk and Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century Italy and Ireland (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her monograph centres women’s roles as collectors, compilers and tellers of folk and fairy tales in European peripheries during the long nineteenth century.

 

Research 

Elena’s research seeks to unearth non-canonical figures and narratives in the European fairy-tale tradition. She also has a keen interest in the poetics and politics of adaptation of fairy tales and children’s literature in contemporary media. She has written and researched on nineteenth-century women writers and folklorists with a transnational and interdisciplinary gaze, on landmarks of the Italian fairy-tale tradition, as well as on fairy-tale re-imaginings by various contemporary directors and artists. Alongside her main research, she is currently investigating hyper-contemporary adaptations of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio and picture books featuring Southern Italian fairy tales.

She has presented her research at numerous international conferences and has been invited as guest lecturer in several universities in Europe and in the United States. Her broader research interests include Italian, Irish and Anglo-American literary crossings and oral traditions from the nineteenth century to the present, translation studies, language pedagogy, Mediterranean studies and island studies (especially Sicilian and Sardinian literatures and cultures).

She is the founder of the Cambridge Research Network for Fairy-Tale Studies, an open space at the University of Cambridge aimed at connecting researchers with an interest in fairy tales. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Fairy Tale Route (Council of Europe) and a consultant for the International Fairy-Tale Filmography, hosted by the University of Winnipeg, Canada, and created by Pauline Greenhill, Kendra Magnus-Johnston and Jack Zipes.

 

Scholarships, prizes and awards

Elena has received many competitive scholarships, prizes and awards, among these:

• The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant
• The Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities Research Grant
• The CRASSH Event Funding (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge)
• The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant for the Venetian Research Program for British & Commonwealth Scholars
• The Women’s Studies Caucus Award (American Association for Italian Studies)
• The St. Catharine’s College Prize for Distinction in Research (University of Cambridge)
• The Estella Canziani Postgraduate Bursary for Research (Folklore Society in London)
• Fulbright scholarship to teach Italian language and culture in the United States (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota)

 

Key publications

Academic Monograph

• 2025 (in press) Seekers of Wonder: Women Writing Folk and Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century Italy and Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Book Chapters and Journal Articles 

• Book Chapter on the Western and Southern European Fairy-Tale Traditions, in The Routledge Companion to Fairy Tales, edited by Claudia Schwabe and Christa Jones (in preparation).
• 2025 (forth.) “Fantaghirò as an ‘Artivist’ Adaptation: Gender Subversions from Italo Calvino’s Fairy Tale to Lamberto Bava’s Cult TV series and Contemporary Fan Art”, Marvels & Tales, 39.1, Special issue “Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition”, edited by Alessandro Cabiati and Lewis Seifert.
• 2024 “‘Miniere di fiabe’: Poetics of Space and Performance within and outside Angela Nardo Cibele’s Folk and Fairy-Tale Writings”, Women Language Literature in Italy / Donne Lingua Letteratura in Italia, 6, 53-64.
• 2023 “(Re)Collections of a ‘Piccola Streghina’ from the Heart of the Mediterranean: Gender and Class Consciousness in Grazia Deledda’s Folkloric Writings”, I.S. MED. – Interdisciplinary Studies on the Mediterranean, 1, edited by Giovanna Summerfield and Rosario Pollicino, 109-129.
• 2022/23 “Introduzione”, “Donne in Sardegna. Creatività ed espressione di sé / Women in Sardinia: Creativity and Self-Expression”, Chronica Mundi, 16-17, co-authored with Sara Delmedico, 7-12.
• 2022 “Maria Savi-Lopez: The Portrait of a Neglected Woman Writer and Folklorist in Post-Unification Italy”, PRISMI Revue d’études italiennes, 3, 141-163.
• 2021 “From Avalon to Southern Italy: The Afterlife of Fata Morgana in Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilianische Märchen (1870)”, Women Language Literature in Italy / Donne Lingua Letteratura in Italia, 3, 103-121.
• 2019 “Six Memos for Teaching Italian as a Foreign Language: Creativity, Storytelling, and Visual Imagination in the Language Classroom”, E-JournALL, EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, 6.1, 37-55.
• 2018 “Maps, Razors, Monocles, Diamonds: Reading H. R. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines through the lenses of Victorian Material Culture”, Estrema: Interdisciplinary Review for the Humanities, 11, 107-128.
• 2017 “Re-imagining the Gothic in Contemporary Serialised Media: An Intertextual and Intermedial Study of Neo-Victorian Monstrous Afterlives”, Crossways Journal, 1.1, 1-31.
• 2015 “Diabolical Crossings: Generic Transitions Between the Gothic and the Sensational in Dacre and Alcott”, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 14, 81-99 (Reprinted in the volume Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, 2019, edited by Rebecca Parks. Prod. Layman Poupard. Detroit: Gale, Cengage 375, pp. 113-123).

Edited Issues

• 2024 Co-editor of “In/out: Women, Performance, Space in Italy” with Serena Laiena, Women Language Literature in Italy / Donne Lingua Letteratura in Italia, 6.
• 2022/23 Co-editor of “Donne in Sardegna. Creatività ed espressione di sé / Women in Sardinia: Creativity and Self-Expression”, Chronica Mundi, 16-17, with Sara Delmedico. Reviews of the special issue available in Il manifesto and in the journal of the association “Toponomastica femminile” Vitamine vaganti.

Interviews

• 2022/23 “‘Le scritture rimangono’: Intervista a Michela Murgia”, “Donne in Sardegna. Creatività ed espressione di sé / Women in Sardinia: Creativity and Self-Expression”, Chronica Mundi, 16-17, co-authored with Sara Delmedico, 278-289.
• 2021 “La centralità del linguaggio nell’Antropocene: Intervista a Vera Gheno”, Italian Minds Podcast, in partnership with the Cambridge University Italian Society.

 Book Reviews

• Review of Claudia Alborghetti’s Gianni Rodari and his English Readers (Rome: Armando Editore), Marvels & Tales (in preparation).
• 2021 Review of Laura Gonzenbach’s Fiabe siciliane, 2nd edition, trans. by Luisa Rubini, re-read by Vincenzo Consolo (Rome: Donzelli, 2019), Annali d’Italianistica, 540-542.

 

Selected Invited Lectures, Papers and Seminars

• 2024 Invited Speaker to the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures and the Folklore and Mythology Program at Harvard University. Seminar: “Women in the History of Italian and Irish Folklore: Transcultural Perspectives in the Long Nineteenth Century.”
• 2024 Invited Lecturer to the Fairy-Tale Studies Seminar Series Riscrivere la fiaba: Percorsi di un genere tra tradizione e adattamento, organised by Alessandro Cabiati and Laura Tosi at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Seminar: “I mille volti delle fiabe: Itinerari intermediali da Giambattista Basile a Emma Dante.”
• 2024 Conference Islands as Crossroads: Reimagining Mobilities in the Mediterranean, organised by Giovanna Di Matteo at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Cambridge). Paper: “Weaving Magical Islandness: The Journeys of Sardinian Fairies Across Centuries and Media.”
• 2023 Online Conference Representing Femininity: Constructing and Deconstructing the Image of Women between Modern and Contemporary Italy, organised by Sara Delmedico and Elena Musiani, University College Dublin and Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, in partnership with the Women’s History Archive in Bologna. Paper: “Damsels in Distress? (Re)Constructing Femininity in Italian Fairy-Tale Adaptations.”
• 2021/24 GEMMA Women’s and Gender Studies Erasmus Mundus Invited Lecturer on Women, Folklore and Fairy Tales in the Long Nineteenth Century, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna.

 

Teaching experience

• Lecturer for the MPhil Degree in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures, University of Cambridge. Module: “Marginalities in Nineteenth-Century European Culture.” Topic: “Echoes from Afar: Women Linguists, Folklorists and Storytellers in Nineteenth-Century Italy.”
• Postgraduate supervisor for the MPhil Degree in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures, University of Cambridge, and supervisor of Year-Abroad projects. Elena has supervised long essays and translation projects on topics ranging from children’s literature to contemporary women’s writing.
• Lecturer and supervisor for IT5 “Italian Identities: Place, Language, and Culture”, University of Cambridge. Topic: ‘‘Between the Old and the New: Grazia Deledda’s Sardinia.”
• Italian language supervisor and supervisor for IT1 “Texts and Contexts.”
• Certified English and Italian language teacher (CELTA and DITALS) and Language Examiner (PLIDA and CELI). Elena has taught in Italy, England and the United States to language learners coming from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, including university students, young learners, immigrants and refugees. Her interests in this field include creative approaches to language learning, creation of authentic didactic materials and implementation of storytelling and creative writing strategies in the FL/L2 classroom.

 

Selected Conference Organisation

• Lead convenor of the international conference Fairy-Tale Trouble and the Art of Fluidity: Gender, Genre, Media, co-organised with Alice Parrinello at the University of Cambridge. Secured competitive funding from the CRASSH Event Funding Scheme (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge).
• Co-organiser of the international conference Strings of Imagination: Rethinking Pinocchio in the New Millennium, with Pablo a Marca at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, sponsored by the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University, the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, the Cambridge Research Network for Fairy-Tale Studies and the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities.
• Co-organiser of the conference Women in Sardinia: Creativity and Self-Expression, with Sara Delmedico on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Grazia Deledda’s birth, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the Society for Italian Studies, the British-Italian Society, the Italian Bookshop in London and the Italian Section at the University of Cambridge.

 

Public engagement and outreach initiatives

Elena has been actively involved in several public engagement and outreach initiatives, among these:

• Public engagement event on Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, co-organized with Pablo a Marca. Performative reading by visual poet and photographer Erminia De Luca, author of Pinocchio’s artistic reinterpretation Ora dipende da te (2022), sponsored by the Cambridge-Intesa Sanpaolo Fund with the support of the Italian Section of the University of Cambridge, Murray Edwards College, the Cambridge Research Network for Fairy-Tale Studies, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, the Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities in New York and the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University.
• Public engagement project Hopeful Folktales: Nurturing Diversity, Gender Equity and Social Justice through Tales of Old Times (Recipient of the University Council of Modern Languages Postgraduate Bursary).
• Storytelling and creative writing workshop “Brave Heroines in a New Light: A Journey into Uncharted Italian Fairy Tales” within the multidisciplinary art exhibition on FINT (female, intersex, non-binary, transgender) folklore Buried Moons – Forgotten Tales from Beyond the Patriarchy, organised by Annie Randall and Emily Unsworth White in Bristol.
• Co-organiser of the Gianni Rodari Virtual Theatre Show with theatre director Ludovico Nolfi, in partnership with the Cambridge University Italian Society.
• PhD Tutor for the Brilliant Club Scholars Programme, an award-winning university access charity that recruits doctoral researchers to share their academic expertise in UK-state schools with pupils from underrepresented backgrounds.
• Postgraduate Session Leader within the Postgraduate Outreach Scheme of the University of Cambridge.